


Fault Lines

by comeblaqtome



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: F/M, M/M, Nurse Denbrough, Self Isolation, Slow Burn, Strangers to Friends to Lovers, additional tags to come as I update, hospital au, tw needles and veins
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-21
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2021-02-17 22:20:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21517366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comeblaqtome/pseuds/comeblaqtome
Summary: Stan is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and is overwhelmed by all the changes it brings to his life. Eventual stenbrough.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Stanley Uris, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

Stanley Uris had spent his entire life doing everything the right way. 

He went from high school straight into college, married a nice Jewish girl his parents liked, established a successful accounting business, and had tried to start a family. 

Which is why he was so angry when his doctor told him he had lung cancer. 

“I never smoked,” he had said.

“If you’ve ever done factory work, or worked in-“

“I’m an accountant.”

“Well, there’s not always an explanation.” 

Stan huffed a sigh, trying to keep his temper from boiling over, “What’s the treatment?” 

“Before we can even think about surgery for the larger tumor, we’ve got to get your lymph nodes clear, otherwise it’s going to keep spreading. Let’s see how you respond to chemo alone, and if we need to we can consider radiation at a later point.”

After setting up a treatment regimen— 2 hours a day in chemo, two weeks on, one week off for two months to start with— Stan left his doctor’s office feeling hollow.

He walked through the parking garage of the hospital, the heavy plod of his feet echoing, and thought maybe he should call someone. Stan unlocked his phone, staring at his wife’s name in his recent calls before deciding this wasn’t the type of thing she should hear over the phone. Or maybe he should call his secretary, but then decided it would be better to wait until tomorrow. 

And all at once, Stan found his car, unlocked the door, reared his arm back, and slammed his phone into the grease stained concrete at his feet. He sunk into the driver’s seat of his car and managed to fumble the key into the ignition before falling apart completely. His hands gripped the wheel as the first sobs choked out of him, tears not yet welling in his eyes, just pain making itself known, audible.

“It was only a cough,” he muttered under his breath, his hands coming up to cover his eyes, tears he hadn’t felt before now streaming down his face unabated. He had been having a dry cough for a couple months. Patty had kept urging him to go to the doctor, but he insisted over and over it was just the change in weather doing it to him. He only brought it up during his annual physical to make her happy. 

And now he had stage 3 lung cancer.

Something in him said that he would have been fine if he had just never mentioned it to the doctor. Maybe he could have gone on living forever if he just never had that CT scan. 

He drove around for a while, not ready to go home and have to say the awful words to his wife, and not yet able to get a handle on the anger that had already destroyed his phone and made him curse out his window at another driver who hadn’t really cut him off. 

When he finally pulled into the driveway the sun had all but set, and he found himself wishing he’d had the guts to stay out all night, to just take some time to be alone with his thoughts. But he couldn’t. He’d never spent a night away from Patricia since they’d been married, and even though the past few years had grown a little cold between them, he loved her dearly. He loved the soft wave of her dark hair, he loved the weight of her next to him in bed, he loved the solid routine of their life. He was afraid that disrupting that routine might leave her with less to love about him.

He came in through the side door off the patio and closed it gently behind him, not wanting to draw attention to himself, dreading the thought of all the sympathetic attention he would receive in the months to come. He hated to be pitied.

“Stanley, are you home?” Patty called from the kitchen.

“Yes, dear.”

She peeked from around the wall and smiled at him, and he noticed how the laugh lines of her face drew up with it, and suddenly felt so, so much older. Her expression dropped when she saw him, his face hollow, his eyes still puffy from tears. He looked vulnerable. Translucent. As if he had wished to be invisible and a genie hadn’t quite finished granting it. 

“What’s wrong?” the tone of panic in her voice set him on edge, and he tensed his shoulders.

“I went back to the doctor today, to get my test results.”

The air conditioner clicked on audibly in the silence around them.

Stan wished there was another side to this conversation she could take up, that the burden wasn’t all on his back.

She put her hand on his shoulder, guided him into the kitchen where he could smell dinner cooking. Pot roast, he thought as he sunk into a chair at the table.

Her voice shook as she tried to reassure him, “It’s ok, baby, I just need to know what the doctor said,” she sat down at the table, an antique made of cherry wood Stan had refinished himself a couple years back. He stroked his hand down its polished edge to distract himself from her panicked eyes.

“Cancer,” the small voice that eked it out couldn’t have been his. 

He cleared his throat, hoping that regaining his voice might help him regain his dignity.

“Non-small cell lung cancer. Stage 3. I’m starting treatment next week,” he rattled off the facts like they were numbers his clients needed, not his life or death prognosis.

“How? You never-“

“I know!” His voice boomed, and her hand jerked away from his shoulder, “I don’t know, I never smoked, I never worked in a factory, or with asbestos, or whatever else the personal injury lawyers are on about this week! I never did any of it, and I still got lung cancer!” 

He regretted blowing up at her as soon as he’d done it. He never yelled at her, even when they argued, he thought yelling at a woman was something only scum could do, and suddenly he felt like such a low life.

He remembered then a show he had watched, probably  _ House _ or  _ Grey’s Anatomy _ or something, he couldn’t quite place it, but one of the doctors said something about lung cancer being the only one people blamed you for. You get a brain tumor, or colon cancer, or leukemia, and people feel sorry for you. Lung, they wonder what you did to cause it. 

He took her hand between both of his and pressed his lips to it, and cried for the umpteenth time that afternoon. 

  
  


The following day he told his staff the news. He was always more of a hands-on boss, and it pained him to say, “I’ll be taking a bit of a step back, but I’ll still be in the office most afternoons, and you all can always reach me by phone,” which, until he went and got a new cell phone, wasn’t really true.

The compassionate glances he received were more than he could handle, and he excused himself to step outside for some air. With all the turmoil of the past 24 hours, he almost wished he had been a smoker, he desperately wanted something to take the edge off. The Atlanta air was dreadfully humid and heavy, September beating down hard on the city, before finally giving way to Fall.

He sat down at the picnic table set up behind the building and remembered the time in college Richie had passed him a blunt at a party and he’d spent 10 minutes coughing until he nearly retched. He’d sworn off anything of the sort since. He laughs at the memory, how badly Richie had teased him for it, and permanently secured his status as designated driver.

He’d spoken with him the night before, and between jokes about Stan still having a house phone to contact him from, Richie had agreed to drive him to his chemo appointments. Stan was glad to have at least one friend he knew wouldn’t give him that pitiful look when he started to get sick from the treatment or shave his head in solidarity if he started to lose his hair. 

And the following Monday, Richie started to follow through on his promise. His knuckles rapped on Stan’s door promptly at 9:30 and though he looked sloppy and disheveled, Stan smiled when he opened the door for him. 

“You want a cup of coffee before we go?” Stan asked, already going to the kitchen and pouring him some in a travel cup.

“Please. If you’ve got anything stronger I’ll take that, too,” Richie pushed his hair back out of his face.

“When was the last time you saw 9am?”

“When was Bush first elected?” 

Stan laughed, the first time he had laughed in days, “Which one?”

“There was more than one?” Richie took the cup from him and burned his tongue on the first sip.

“Can we take this history lesson on the road? I don’t wanna be late.”

“After you, Stan my man,” Richie gestured toward the door and spun his keyring around his finger.

Richie was always great at pretending things were alright, and Stan appreciated that all the way up to the fourth floor of the hospital, when he left after Stan checked in. 

“I’ve got some errands to run, pick you up in 2 hours, right?” 

“Right. Thanks again for the ride,” Stan nodded, and he thought he was alright being alone until he saw the elevator doors close between them. A lump quickly rose up in his throat. 

A nurse took him into a room full of big armchairs that looked out over the grounds of the hospital, the morning light streaming in, soft and golden across the white tiles. She left for a moment to retrieve a cart full of needles and tubes of various sizes, and Stan offered up his left arm, trying not to show he was shaking. 

He took a deep breath, the sterile smell of the room almost burning his nostrils, preparing for the brief sting in the crook of his elbow. 

And then she missed the vein.

He gritted his teeth as she apologized, and gave her a cordial, “It’s okay.” She tried again, this time fishing the needle a little bit, and he cursed through his teeth. 

“Sorry, I’m sorry, the vein keeps moving,” she said. 

She tried once more, and he lost his temper, “Stop! Stop, fuck, just get me another nurse!” he held his hand over the tender crook of his elbow to protect it from her. 

“Yes, sir, I’m so sorry, um,” she offered quickly and hurried out of the room. He took a few deep breaths, his eyes stinging, and he cursed himself for yelling.

Eventually another nurse came in and was able to start his IV, not without difficulty, but better than the last, at least. “Don’t you do this every day? Is it really that fucking hard?” He sat back in the chair and grimaced at the cold trickle of it into his arm. The nurse didn’t respond to him, only took her equipment and left as quickly as she could.

The two hours crawled by and he made a note to himself to bring a book, his Facebook feed not nearly enough to occupy him. By the time Richie came back to get him, it was clear that the first vein the nurse had gone for was worse for wear, a dark bruise was forming under the delicate skin. 

“You wanna grab some lunch before I take you home?” Richie tried hard to hide the concern in his voice, but wasn’t very successful.

“Yea, if you don’t mind.” 

Around 3 o’clock Stan regretted his decision as a debilitating nausea swept over him, and he spent the rest of the afternoon laid back on the couch, watching tv and trying not to move.

Patty came home and doted on him, bringing him a light blanket and fixing some soup she hoped would be easy on his stomach. He’d lost enough weight in the months before his diagnosis, she was afraid of him getting any leaner. Stan was thankful, but the shame of having her take care of him twisted his stomach up more than the treatment had. 

  
  


The subsequent two weeks proceeded in much the same way. Both of Stan’s arms were purple and yellow through the elbows, the nurses insisted over and over that he simply had bad veins, and he insisted that they were simply fuckups. Every day he’d get someone new, and every day he’d blow up at them. It wasn’t all their fault, he knew, but the pain of being a pin cushion coupled with the frustration of feeling so utterly helpless left him with an ever shorter fuse. Some nights he’d spit venom at Patty despite her well intended efforts. He only wanted to be able to retch in the middle of the night alone, to preserve some of his dignity, but she was determined to always be there with a wet rag to wipe his mouth. 

Maybe it was a little old-fashioned of him but he hated the shift in roles they had taken. He much preferred to feel like he was able to take care of her. The one week he spent on break from chemo was filled with macrobiotic recipes she had found on the internet, saying that one of those afternoon doctor shows said they were good for cancer patients. Stan laughed to himself, “Lately I’ve been anything but patient.”

Starting back that next week, his scans and bloodwork had shown no improvement. “Not unusual. Usually several rounds are necessary before we start to see much of a difference. What’s important right now is you aren’t getting worse,” his doctor told him, but Stan was sure he’d never felt worse in his life. 

The nurses at the front desk avoided eye contact with him as he signed in. Surely office gossip had gotten around about him being an asshole. He sat in his usual chair for a while before someone came in to set him up. “J-j-jeez, they’ve really b-be-beaten you up,” a man in maroon scrubs said to him, taking his left arm in his hand and looking it over closely. 

“Oh, uh, yea. Don’t the nurses on this ward wear blue?” 

“I’m not f-from the cancer ward, I float between d-d-different departments each day, depending on st-sta-affing needs,” the man swabbed his arm and hung the IV bag before Stan knew it was over. 

“Holy shit, can I request you or something? This is the first time anyone has stuck me on the first try,” Stan smiled a little, thought to himself he hadn’t smiled in days. 

“You can t-t-try,” he tapped the ID badge clipped to his collar, “Name’s Bill.”

“Stan,” he held out his free hand and they shook. Bill gathered up his cart and started to leave. “Have a good day,” Stan called as he watched him go. 

  
  


“Sorry to put you through that,” a blonde nurse with a perky ponytail said as Bill went behind the nurse’s station to grab some paperwork. 

“What d-d-do you mean?” Bill looked on his clipboard to find the next room he was headed to. He never really got into hospital gossip like the other nurses, being part of the float pool kept him on the move to much to keep up. 

“He’s one of the bitchiest patients I’ve ever had. Usually people that come through here are all depressed and mopey, but he, like, is angry all the time. Constantly says we don’t know what we’re doing, cursing at us,” she rolled her eyes.

“J-judging by the blown v-v-veins in his arms, you  _ don’t  _ know w-what you’re doing,” Bill gathered up his charts and went on his way.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this has taken me so long to get up, I kept going back to edit stuff in chapter 1 (nothing that affected the plot, just formatting and phrasing and switching some paragraphs around). Thanks for all the lovely comments, they really keep me motivated!

By the Saturday of his next week off of chemo, Stan felt almost normal. And compared to the last month or so of nausea, aching, and mood swings, normal felt pretty damn amazing. 

He woke up at a quarter past 7, late in his book, and rolled over to find Patty still asleep next to him. He scooted closer and spooned her, placed open mouth kisses down her neck. Her eyes opened slowly, “Hm? Stanley?”

“So I’ve been told,” he pulled the sleeve of her nightgown to the side to kiss at her collarbone.

“How are you feeling?” she sounded like his mom when he was sick as a kid, all but holding her hand to his forehead to check his temperature. He pushed the thought away and kissed her despite their morning breath, tongue dragging slow across her bottom lip and teasing into her mouth, enticing, tempting. 

“Horny,” his voice was deep as he whispered to her, slipping under the sheets to sink his head between her legs.

“Are you sure you’re feeling up to it?” 

“I am if you are,” in truth, their physical relationship had been lacking even before he’d gotten sick. For the past year or so, their marriage had been much more based on companionship than passion. At times, it made Stan feel far older than thirty-five.

“I don’t want you to overdo it, make yourself feel worse later.”

Stan pulled the sheets down so he could look up at her, the morning light starting to stream between the blinds and light up the highlights in his curls, “Patricia, if you don’t want to have sex, just say so.”

“I don’t want to have sex.”

“Alright,” Stan got up and crossed to their en suite bathroom, started the shower. He pulled off his pajama pants and tossed them into the hamper. “I was thinking we could go out tonight. To Lumière, have some dinner. I heard they have a pretty great new pianist.”

“That sounds nice. I’ll call and see if we can get a table.”

Stan stepped into the shower and sighed at the hot water running over his shoulders, down his back. He stretched and felt his bones crack and pop. He grabbed his soap and started to lather it across his chest, and wondered if his wife still loved him. He opened his eyes, surprised at the thought, and ignored it. 

But all through the day it occurred to him again. When he went into the kitchen and made breakfast for the two of them, she didn’t stick around to talk to him. When he went to work on his newest puzzle in the spare room, she put down her sewing and left. When they began getting ready for dinner, she stepped out of the room for him to get dressed by himself. 

At any other point in their marriage, he would have asked her if something was the matter. If not to make her feel better, to make the house a little less lonely. But now he found himself thinking, maybe he didn’t love her either. He held her hand over the white table cloth at the restaurant, he asked her to dance when the pianist played a song he knew she liked, he volunteered to be the designated driver so she could sample wines.

And he felt he was tired of performing affection for a love he didn’t feel anymore. That felt worse, somehow, than the anger and the resentment he’d been fighting for nearly two months now. Anger felt like fighting and being tired felt like giving up. 

It never occurred to him that Patty might be tired too. Not just from the restless nights staying up while her husband knelt by the toilet bowl, or from fielding calls from his office to see if they really needed him or not, or even from picking up the slack around the house to keep yard trimmed. Patricia Uris was tired of her husband’s selfishness. And a single night out catering to her was not going to fix that.

Maybe Stan had already given up with Patty, and that was the problem. Maybe he’d already resigned himself to the kind of marriage he thought he deserved, and had laid down the fight a long time ago. 

All of which stayed on his mind well into Monday, as he sat setting up a chessboard that had been left by the chair two down from his. It had been a long time since he’d played, so playing a round against himself sounded like fun. 

When he’d gotten all the pieces set up, a pleasant, “Good m-m-morning,” rang out from his side and made Stan smile without thinking. 

“Good morning, Bill. I was wondering when you’d be back around here again,” he held out his arm and for a moment wondered why he was so impressed by the size of Bill’s warm, and- wow, soft- hand grasping his elbow. 

“P-p-probably a lot for the next few w-w-weeks, a nurse off this floor just quit,” Bill was as quick and fluid as ever. His hands didn’t stutter.

“Do you play chess?” 

“Once or t-twice. I don’t even remember w-w-what all the pieces do,” Bill protested as if he was going to turn down the unspoken invitation, but he pulled up a plastic chair from the side of the room anyway.

“No worries, I was on the chess team in high school, I’ll show you,” Stan began explaining the functions of the different pieces, and Bill’s eyes fixed intently on his hands as he gestured across the board.

They started up a game and Stan went easy on Bill, letting him get used to the logistics of it all. 

“Are you sure you don’t have somewhere to be?”

“Th-the hospital’s being inspected t-t-today, so we’re way o-overstaffed. I can sp-spend some time with you,” Bill tentatively moved one of his rooks. 

“Oh, bad move, Denbrough. I can’t even pretend not to see that,” Stan captured it with a pawn. 

“I knew y-you were going e-easy on me!” Bill chuckled and it started Stan laughing too; the warm air between them lit by the noon sun streaming in, but the hairs on Stan’s arm stood up anyway. 

“So, ch-chess team, huh? You m-must’ve been a real loser,” the tone of his voice conveyed a joke, and years of being friends with Richie had trained Stan to always crack wise right back.

“Well, sure, but look who’s talking, you’re a middle aged nurse,” he instantly wished he hadn’t said that, he didn’t know Bill like that, didn’t know if it was a sore spot.

“As if a-anyone is really doing what they want to in their th-thirties,” Bill seemed rather unfazed, and if he’d wanted to he could have left, so Stan figured it must have been alright. 

“What would you be doing if you were?” 

“Writing,” Bill’s gaze was focused on the board, trying to see what Stan’s next move might be.

“You mean fiction writing, or journalism, or?”

“F-fiction. I’ve published some p-poems and short stories b-b-before, but if it were my full time gig? That w-w-would be ideal,” Bill’s eyes followed Stan’s fingers as they glided his queen four spaces over.

“Oh, wow. That’s really impressive.”

“What about you?”

“Huh?”

“What w-would you be doing?” 

Stan was silent for a long moment, considering for the first time that he didn’t really have dreams. He had a good wife, a nice house, a respectable job, and as far as he knew there wasn’t more to hope for. And yet, a raw kind of desire began to burn in his stomach. 

“I don’t know, actually. I’ve got a quiet life. Everything I need,” Stan sat back in his chair.

“B-but what do you want?” Bill’s eyes met his and in the sun Stan couldn’t tell whether they were blue or green, or maybe some kind of hazel, little flecks of gray or brown mixed in. He wondered how long he would have to look to decide.

“Maybe I’d paint. Be that guy who sits down in the park and paints the birds that land on the fountain,” he smiled a little, at how silly it felt to say out loud.

Bill nodded at _The Thing With Feathers_ in Stan’s lap, “You must really l-like birds. What is it ab-bout them?”

Stan shrugged, “My dad and I would watch birds together when I was a kid. I’d write them all down in this book he’d given me and had this manual to identify them with. I never grew out of it, I guess. Are you close with your family?”

“N-not really. My little brother d-d-d…” Bill swallowed the word and Stan’s brow furrowed in concern.

“He passed away.”

“Y-yea, thank you. In a car accident. My f-family was never close after th-that. I k-kind of used writing to cope.”

Stan’s hand found Bill’s over the table and patted his knuckles in an attempt to comfort him without breaching a line of too much intimacy.

He felt Bill relax under the touch, and it was easy. So easy, it crept back into his mind on the ride home, as he watched Richie’s hands on the wheel, thinking he had an awful lot more hair on his knuckles than Bill did. 

And again as he began to cook dinner, julienning carrots on the granite cutting board, and thinking of how his fingers might have fit between Bill’s, and shaking the thought off. Strange.

And again when Patty came home, fresh manicure on her hands, and thinking to himself that he really did prefer fingernails kept natural. How nurses were required to.

  
  



End file.
